Interview: Qinetiq chief executive Leo Quinn wants to bring a corporate
perspective to life at the defence technology group.

"The employees are basically expendable carbon bags, to be tossed out when the upper management deem them to be of no further worth."

Search for QinetiQ on the internet and this quote is one of the first things you find – it is in a blog written by an unknown employee called Qinetiq-ette who claims to be "following the adventures of Nu QinetiQ".

In another of many postings over the past two years, QinetiQ-ette claims it receives 600 hits a day and its aim "is to help make QinetiQ a better place for the employees, not just a better place for the shareholders (many of whom must be ruing the day they invested) and senior management".

For Leo Quinn, chief executive of the defence technology group, these are clearly interesting times.

The former De La Rue chief executive arrived at QinetiQ in 2010 with the company, whose scientists are famed as the inspiration for James Bond's gadget guru Q, running out of cash and fresh from two profits warnings.

QinetiQ had been sliding into trouble since being controversially spun out of the Government in 2003 through a deal with private equity group Carlyle, and then floated in 2006. If Facebook was not ready for public markets in 2012, then neither was QinetiQ in 2006.

Quinn's solution was to launch a 24-month self-help plan to cut debt and transform QinetiQ's culture from public sector organisation into private sector business.

When the financial results of the programme were unveiled last month, the market liked what it saw. Net debt had been cut from £538m to £122m, costs slashed, and the pension deficit was down.

However, the blog suggests not everyone is happy with the results. "The world has now changed," Quinn says. "One disgruntled employee can, via the internet, acquire quite a following or deliver messages which are highly opinionated.

"I can tell you that as I read the site it almost looks like a personal attack on the leadership and sometimes in my own case on me. My view is that we have a very clear strategy. It is about clearly engaging our employees. My job is to create an environment for them to be successful."

Quinn says he "hasn't got a clue" who is behind the blog but does not believe it is representative of the views held by the entire workforce. "If it was we wouldn't have 5,000 employees actively engaged in driving this business towards success, would we?" he says.

However, the company has also been described as "morally repugnant" by trade union Prospect after it derecognised the unions, ended collective bargaining, and set up its own employee engagement group. Quinn claims the unions were derecognised because union membership in the company was "historical and low".

QinetiQ estimates that just 25pc to 30pc of its workforce were members and that this group was dominated by former pre-privatisation staff, whose civil servant contracts included more holiday, double redundancy pay, and a final salary pension. "What we found over time is that our union was getting further and further away from what was the church of the company," Quinn says. "We are now working with unions on what formal recognition is acceptable."

Speaking to Quinn, it is not difficult to see why he may have ruffled a few feathers. He is immersed in his plan to change the company and bring a corporate perspective to life at QinetiQ. At the start of the interview he is checking the share price, during it he is drawing on a whiteboard to illustrate his points, and throughout he uses management terms such as "organic plus" to describe the strategy. However, he believes the company is changing with him.

"Can you measure it? Absolutely. You can feel the difference. We have measured the number of managers we have changed at the top level and the next level down. At the end of the day I am just a believer in the fact that great leaders drive great businesses. If you put the right person in charge that makes all the difference," Quinn adds.

He also points to My Contribution, a programme set up by the company to collect ideas from employees that has attracted 9,000 suggestions.

These cultural changes, he argues, have provided the foundations for the next phase of QinetiQ's development. This is "organic-plus", a splitting of QinetiQ's businesses into three parts – core, explore and test for value. The idea is to approach investment in research and development in a more structured fashion while not dampening QinetiQ's legendary innovation.

Core includes 90pc of the company's revenue and the iconic defence and aerospace technologies and services such as the Talon robot; "explore" is new technologies that could become major businesses; while "test for value" is immature products that have uncertain futures.

"I have a great saying, well I think it's great," Quinns says. "Empowerment without measurement is abandonment.

"It felt a little bit like a university [when Quinn first arrived]. There was lots of very, very bright people doing really good stuff, but it was a struggle to work out how it was being paid for."

Quinn believes QinetiQ ran into trouble because it "tried to be something it wasn't" by developing and selling technologies that it had designed. "Can I correct what might be a slight misconception. What does QinetiQ actually do? It absolutely does innovate but what it does is partner with Government or the MoD. Someone will come to us with a problem to solve. Our people will work on that and get knowledge that helps on other things."

This means that with its new technologies QinetiQ is looking for partners who can produce and sell the products.

One of its most promising is OptaSense, a cable that can detect trespassers or threats to critical assets around the world by sending data back to the customer. QinetiQ has dubbed the technology the "Earth's Nervous System" and believes it can protect borders, oil pipelines and railways.

The company has struck a deal with Shell for the energy group to use OptaSense in its fracking operations and is now looking to strike a similar commercial partnership with a rail group. If OptaSense takes off, then it could drive future growth for the company.

Such growth will vindicate Quinn's strategy. The Government and MOD is already understood to be looking at QinetiQ as a "Petri dish" of how it can make the civil service more efficient and dynamic. But if QinetiQ fails to grow, one thing is for sure. The critics are waiting to pounce.